I would encourage you to consider how the Drug War has created the opioid problem by outlawing godsend psychoactive medicine, discouraging honest talk about substances, and incentivizing dealers to sell the most available and addictive substances possible. Please consider that the Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of plant medicine1, and that drugs are therefore not the problem. Rather the desire for transcendence is universal, and when we make that transcendence illegal through drug laws, we empower criminals to sell the most dangerous substances possible.
Please consider also that the menace is not from opiates, Arab: the menace is from the Drug War, which for the first time in human history has told humanity that it has no right to the medical and religious bounty that grows at their very feet.
The desire for self-transcendence will never disappear. The desire for profit will never disappear. If we want less suffering in the world, what needs to disappear is the anti-scientific and anti-religious war on psychoactive plant medicine, aka the Drug War.
Author's Follow-up: June 21, 2024
This is the whole problem with the Drug War: it demonizes drugs. Well, guess what? All drugs have positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance. Even cyanide has potential positive uses.2
After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.
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